Antonio Vitti, Italian American Heritage Month (October 16)

Italian and Film Studies to celebrate the Italian – American heritage month invite you to

a talk on

SOCIAL INQUIRY, OPPOSITION AND INTERVENTION IN GIANNI AMELIO’S CINEMA

Dr. Antonio Vitti Professor of Italian cinema, Indiana University

OCTOBER 16. 5. 00 pm Greene Hall , Room 162

Professor Vitti began film studies at the University of Michigan and at Iowa University. Former professor at Wake Forest University, Antonio Vitti is the director of the Italian School of language at Middlebury College and professor of Italian cinema (2009-) at Indiana University. His research has been primarily in the areas of Film Studies and Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature and Culture. His interests include Pasolini, Scola, Wertmüller, De Santis, Rossellini, Amelio, Roversi, Montaldo, Rimanelli, Nanni Loy, Tornatore, Moretti and Monicelli. He is interested in Italian American/Canadian writers and poetry from emigrants. Other interests include photography, political songs and the relationship between popularcinema and political power.

After the political cinema of the seventies, Italian cinema, with the release of many films that showed a strong interest in the political and socioeconomic national realities, received world attention and many critics marked this revival as the rebirth of a new political cinema. In the revived interests of this new political cinema, Gianni Amelio’s cinema is for the most part left out in spite of the fact that from the start he has produced films that touch upon all the major dramatic themes of our time: the death penalty, pedophilia, prostitution, child abuse, corruption, immigration, historical amnesia, internal migration, racism, generational conflict, globalization, and post-industrialization, seen from the perspectives of people who are directly affected. The lecture will discuss how in the current political and economic climate, it is easier for the spectator to engage with Amelio’s films that show how Fascism, communist utopia, consumerism and capitalism have all failed, than with films by others that personalize solutions or mythologize history, and lack the epos, the psychological acuity and the underlying political acumen that underline Amelio’s stories.